MATLAB® is a product of The MathWorks, Inc. of Natick, Mass., which provides engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and educators across a diverse range of industries with an environment for technical computing applications. MATLAB® is an intuitive high performance language and technical computing environment that provides mathematical and graphical tools for mathematical computation, data analysis, visualization and algorithm development. MATLAB® integrates numerical analysis, matrix computation, signal processing, and graphics in an easy-to-use environment where problems and solutions are expressed in familiar mathematical notation, without traditional programming. MATLAB® is used to solve complex engineering and scientific problems by developing mathematical models that simulate the problem. A model is prototyped, tested and analyzed by running the model under multiple boundary conditions, data parameters, or just a number of initial guesses. In MATLAB®, one can easily modify the model, plot a new variable or reformulate the problem in a rapid interactive fashion that is typically not feasible in a non-interpreted programming such as Fortran or C.
As a desktop application, MATLAB® allows scientists and engineers to interactively perform complex analysis and modeling in their familiar workstation environment. With many engineering and scientific problems requiring larger and more complex modeling, computations accordingly become more resource intensive and time-consuming. However, a single workstation can be limiting to the size of the problem that can be solved, because of the relationship of the computing power of the workstation to the computing power necessary to execute computing intensive iterative processing of complex problems in a reasonable time. For example, a simulation of a large complex aircraft model may take a reasonable time to run with a single computation with a specified set of parameters. However, the analysis of the problem may also require the model be computed multiple times with a different set of parameters, e.g., at one-hundred different altitude levels and fifty different aircraft weights, to understand the behavior of the model under varied conditions. This would require five-thousand computations to analyze the problem as desired and the single workstation would take an unreasonable or undesirable amount of time to perform these simulations. Therefore, it is desirable to perform a computation concurrently using multiple workstations when the computation becomes so large and complex that it cannot be completed in a reasonable amount of time on a single workstation.
Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standard for an interface for message passing. MPI communications have been used for performing message passing between parallel machines or workstations in concurrent computing systems. In conventional concurrent computing systems, computing applications, which make use of MPI communications must be launched using a launcher program (usually called “mpirun” or “mpiexec”). An example of the syntax for calling mpirun is as follows.
mpirun-np<number of processes> <application name and arguments>
Once the applications have been launched on a concurrent computing system, the size of collaboration (the number of processes) is typically fixed for the duration of the applications. This is inconvenient in that if a user wishes to add processes to the concurrent computation, the user must completely repeat the entire launching processes. Therefore, it would be desirable to have a concurrent computing system in which the size of collaboration or the number of processes can be modified dynamically even after the applications have been launched on the concurrent computing system.